Hawarden High School in Flintshire has been announced as the winners of British Food Fortnight's 'Cook for Life' Challenge 2008, sponsored by Kenwood, in which schools were challenged to design and cook a meal using the minimum number of food miles.

Years 10 and 11 of Hawarden High School in Flintshire designed and cooked a meal that cut food miles to below 5%.  They commenced the Challenge by making a selection of traditional British dishes using ingredients that had either been donated by the school community or that they had picked in the school grounds. The pupils photographed the finished dishes and created style sheets.  From these, they decided  their menu for the Challenge: Indian-style Pigeon and Lamb Kebabs served with an authentic, home-made flatbread and a drizzle of seasonal relish; Delicious Baked Codling served on a golden brown potato rosti, finished with a seasonal salad garnish; Succulent Buffalo Pie, made with the finest North Wales Buffalo, slow roasted in a moist bitter ale and topped with the flakiest pastry, served with winter roasted vegetables; and Apple Up-side-down Cake served with lashings of homemade honey ice-cream and a gorgeous blackberry coulis.

Initially the pupils calculated the number of food miles for this meal to be over 37,000! With a little careful substitution and modification of ingredients they managed to cut the miles down to 1502 (under 5%!). For example, they replaced vanilla with local honey in their ice cream, used local gooseberries in place of an orange in the main course, and exchanged cane sugar for home produced beet sugar. Pupils even made their own Welsh Acorn Coffee, using acorns that they had collected, with which to finish off the meal! As an experiment, this coffee was also used to make a coffee cake.

This project inspired the pupils to pose a few questions; whether they should support fair trade products from far away if there are low-food-mile alternatives at home; whether the food miles attached to different methods of transport should be weighted depending on their global impact, for example air vs. boat; and if it is realistic to assume that busy modern families have the time and money to afford and produce food in this way on a regular basis.

Whilst they did not come up with definitive answers,  the project did give the group and the school as a whole, a better understanding of the role of food quality, food production and food trade in their lives. The pupils felt that the main lesson that needs to be learnt is that we should all take more responsibility for producing more of our own food, but it is unrealistic to expect that to mean the sacrifice of the broad palette of foods and tastes that have become available to us over the years.